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B37
sunday arts
May 18, 2014 www.guardian.co.tt Sunday Guardian
BB AC B
In many ways, writer Gabriel
Garcia Márquez gave the genre of
magical realism a sense of roots.
His writing was more believable
and more accessible to readers than
Franz Kafka s Metamorphosis,
arguably the first magical realist
story. (For many readers Gregor
Samsa s transformation into a
cockroach is a hard pill to swal-
low.)
Garcia Márquez s literature was
more rooted in reality than the fiction
of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris.
Harris s Palace of the Peacock, which
is nearly off the scale on the magical
side of magical realism, predates the
Garcia Márquez masterpiece One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by
seven years.
Garcia Márquez believed the magic
in magical realism must be rooted
in reality. The Colombian writer s
background in journalism provided
his magical realism with a sense of
reality.
His journalistic roots and his pen-
chant for spinning a good tale---a
quality he learned from the grand-
mother he grew up with in Aracat-
aca---became most evident in the
novel Of Love and Other Demons.
In the introduction of this novel
about a girl named Sierva Maria,
who is bitten by a rabid dog on her
12th birthday, Garcia Márquez gives
great insight into how he fashioned
a story. In this case, he remem-
bered one of the many magical sto-
ries his grandmother used to tell him
about a beautiful young girl who had
been defined by her very long, red
hair. The details of his grandmother s
story came spilling out the day he
rushed from his newspaper office
(where he worked as a young
reporter) to cover a story about a cof-
fin that had been recovered in an
excavation.
When the coffin was opened, a
shocking amount of "copper" hair
came cascading out. (Hair, Garcia
Márquez explained, keeps growing
even after death). He filed his grand-
mother s story away with the images
of the young girl in his news story
until it all came together to be pub-
lished as Of Love and Other Demons
in 1994.
Sierva Maria is the beloved only
child of a noble family on the decline
in an eighteenth-century South
American seaport. After a rabid dog
bites Sierva Maria, her disbelieving
family send her to a convent where Fr
Cayetano Delaura falls in love with
the girl he had once seen in his
dreams.
Of Love and Other Demons is one
of Garcia Márquez s most beautiful
novels not only for language, but for
the message of doomed love and the
precision with which he explores
passion and madness.
In the end, readers will likely come
away with the feeling that they
understand love on a whole new
level. That s the power of Gabriel
Garcia Márquez.
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The roots of
magical realism
The Sunday Arts Section (SAS) Book Club continues
its tribute to the late great Colombian Nobel Laureate
in Literature, GABRIEL GARCIA MÁRQUEZ.
A review by
A A C A
Do makers of maps and Rastamen
ponder the same states of grace and
ruination? Kei Miller does not answer
this question directly, but he gives it
space for ample, and animated, nav-
igation, in his newest collection of
poems, The Cartographer Tries to
Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet Press,
2014).
Miller s book of essays, Writing
Down the Vision (Peepal Tree Press,
2013), was the winner of the 2014 OCM
Bocas Non-Fiction Prize. He has pub-
lished three previous collections of
poetry, and three fiction titles.
These poems meet each other on
the page with the intensity of a reggae
sound clash, outfitted to one overar-
ching purpose: to delineate Zion. The
cartographer, who embodies the work s
principal narration, seeks to lend top-
ographical purpose to the island. He
understands the nebulous nature of
his mission.
Miller s voice finds its strongest sus-
tained footing in the multi-segmented
poem that shares its name with the
entire collection. In movement xxi of
that piece, the cartographer poses him-
self the question: "How does one map
a place that is not quite a place? How
does one draw towards the heart?"
The Cartographer Tries to Map a
Way to Zion, the poem, works as con-
versational soul-baring, between map-
maker and rastaman, in which the
former s assiduous science and the
latter s emotional volubility square off
against each other. The rastaman,
established by the poet as a longtime
lover of his island and of the people
therein, affirms that Zion is not merely
a finite destination.
In movement xxiii of the same long-
form poem, the Rastaman declares
Zion to be "an accounts settling day...
a reach deep inna yu pocket and pay
de bill cause more than lights and
water going to get lock off today day."
In the reckoning that Zion represents,
the Rastaman triumphantly claims
vouchsafed victories as necessary pay-
ment for his people s suffering, for
Natty s frequent pains at the hands
of Babylon.
What The Cartographer Tries to
Map a Way to Zion the poem does,
in all its several rapport-exchanging
compartments, is to show that one
heavenly state can be perceived, with
equal ardour, by two entities who have
distinct ideas of what that heaven
means. How we strive to reach it,
whether with the tools of a Rastaman s
good deeds, or a cartographer s astro-
labe and compass, depends on where
our own relationship with the land
lies.
One could argue that the other
poems of the collection are auxiliary
components, serving to bolster the
titular piece s diverse, frequently
whimsical strengths. While some of
the remaining poems lack the title
poem s strong spine of declarative
intent, the collection reveals several
other praiseworthy gems.
The movement of poems that con-
cern themselves with descriptions of
place names, for instance, are rich
with illustrative definitions. They inter-
rogate, both playfully and with con-
cern, the historical and emotive res-
onances that linger behind the words
we ascribe to destinations. The entire
Place Names series is proof that no
names are arbitrary, even when they
were issued without thought or par-
ticular regard. In "Place Name: Me-
No-Sen-You-No-Come," the narrator
makes that foreboding place name
plain, in language any coloniser would
understand: "without invitation, you re
not welcome... or else, come in as
you please---just know that this
ground, these bushes, these trees
observe you with suspicion many cen-
turies deep."
Zion, by the poet s ultimate reck-
oning, is not solely to be found in the
soul repositories of Jamaica s best and
brightest---if it is to be found at all.
Getting there requires a kind of watch-
ful penance, and the willingness not
to forget those things in history that
were most shameful for one s ancestors
to endure.
As a themed collection, The Car-
tographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
works wonders on any literary dispo-
sition that s weary of too many recy-
cled, generic poems on odyssey and
return. Miller s fourth poetry collection
retains ebullience even alongside
depictions of great sorrow. You can
come to this body of work for paeans
to rubber ducks, and for lamentations
of the master s lash alike, both ren-
dered with an immaculate sensitivity.
Though some of the poems are
slight, the backbone of Miller s verse
offerings is resilient, concerned as it
is with unknowable places, and all the
people who strive to get there.
C i
y i
ll r
l r r , 2013
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C i
y i C B
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A i 5. C
C B CA / A
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